CONTRACT KILLER ACCIDENTALLY CAUGHT

In one of the most glaring errors in Moscow's post-Soviet police history, a contract killer was accidentally apprehended last Monday, April 12th at the scene of the crime on Universitetsky Prospekt. Everything about this story is just a repeat of the same ol' thing you've been reading here in death porn from day one: director of shady cash-heavy firm (in this case, "Cash Plus," located

"Ja, guten morgue-en, I am ze Greens Party Foreign Minister of ze Deutschland, and I just vant to say zat I love ze Death Porn my favorite!"

on Tverskaya Yamskaya) gets jumped near his podyezd' by a flathead with a machine-gun. But this story has an unusual twist. The killer, a 31-year-old resident of the pod-Moskvoi region, proved to be about as good a shot as the fellas from Skif: he sprayed the director, his bodyguard and driver just as they were getting into the car, but only managed to graze the key target and barely wounded the driver and bodyguard. He then moved up to the car and started firing point blank, when, Abbot & Costello-like, a patrol from the Gagarinksy OVD bumbled in to check out all the racket. The contract killer was so stunned by this unprecedented intrusion on his right to ice a director near the victim's podyezd' without fear of consequence that somehow the cops managed to capture and book the suspect.

No word yet on whether the cops have been punished.

KIDS MAKE LUCKY FIND

Let's move on to Tuesday, April 13th, when a pair of teenagers playing in a garbage dumpster beneath the Shelepikhnsy Bridge discovered something that made playing in a garbage dumpster worthwhile. According to Moskovsky Komsomolets, the teensters dragged a pair of black Hefty bags out of the

dumpster, opened them up, and discovered the severed arms, legs and trunks of two young women, whom homicide investigators believe to have been aged 20-30. They're having some difficulty nailing down the identities of the victims since the heads have yet to be discovered. The naked body parts consisted of two legs (one complete, one cut to the knee), one arm with shoulder attached, and two neck-less torsos. One leg boasted a tattoo reading "Zlo", or "Evil", while the feet had been freshly pedicured and the toenails painted with a dark-blue polish. This really puts some perspective on Walter Sobchack's comment in the Big Lebowski: "You want me to get you a toe, dude? I can get you a toe, with polish. You don't want to know how, but there are ways, dude." GUVD sources suggest that the women were killed on Easter Sunday.

AS DUMB AS IT GETS

On the same day that the boys discovered the dismembered corpses, police discovered a pair of dead victims of one of the dumbest crimes in--well, in days. The venerable MK reported that a pair of photographers for an unnamed automobile magazine met two men at a stall and brought them back to their rented apartment on Profsoyuznaya Ulitsa for some manly drinking. Sometime during the party, the elder of the two guests (one was 39, the other

"Naw, it's nothing, don't worry. My arm does this to me all the time."

23) said that he wanted to kill one of his hosts. And ya know what he did? He killed both of his hosts, stabbing them a total of 55 times with a kitchen knife. The guests then swiped a tape recorder and split.

So how did investigators uncover this seemingly difficult-to-pin, anonymous crime, you ask? Simple. The younger murderer stopped by the victim's neighbor, gave her his home phone number, and asked her to call his parents to tell them that he'd be coming home late that day. Investigators promptly discovered the phone number, called, and picked up the suspects.

THELMA KILLS LOUISE

Don't have a Hallmark card handy to send to your best friend? Then pop on by her house and rip her throat out! These days, everyone's doing it...Just ask pudgy little Alina Maslova, the delusional 16 year-old syphilitic slasher who on February 2 of this year in the Moscow suburb of Chekhova let herself in to her best friend's apartment, ripped her throat open from ear to ear, and made off with a handsome 1800 rubles! Not only was it faster than a greeting card, but the 1800 rubles kept Alina and her two brain-dead teenage accomplices fed for almost three full days. And people say there's no opportunity in modern Russia. Here's how it happened, according to police, who pulled off what has to be the law enforcement coup of the century by capturing the three living-witness-leaving, bloody-weapon-retaining, incriminating-evidence-brandishing teenagers within just a few blocks of the blood-spattered home of 15 year-old victim Marina Larinaya. It seems Marina and Alina had been best friends since they were toddlers. Like most best friends, they were partly attracted by the opposite natures of each other's characters. Marina, the doted-upon angelic only child, arrived in high school a hard-working if not particularly gifted A student and teacher's pet; Alina, the second of two beady-eyed pudgy children in a severe, loveless, alcoholic household, emerged from puberty an egocentric and paranoid bundle of hellish developmental complexes. Alina's parents, who fought constantly in drunken

"Oo! Oh! Hey, watch it, pal! I'm ticklish there!"

rages and were constantly short of money, had counseled both their children to live out their lives according to one simple principle: "We live among wolves, and here, money is power." Alina, a clever and introverted sort, took the lesson to heart early. From the third grade on, she took to pinching stuff from her girlfriends' apartments, a practice which led her to gradually be banned from the homes of almost everyone she knew. Throughout it all, however, she made a point to stay on the good side of her best friend Marina, upon whom she was psychologically-- and, because Marina's family had her over for dinner so often, nutritionally--dependent. Unfortunately for Alina, however, events would conspire to force Marina out of her orbit at the start of high school. First, Alina's parents decided to send her to a different high school, one specializing in music, at which her even uglier older sister excelled; secondly, Marina had begun to hang with a new, cooler crowd. It's the typical Brady Bunch plot: girl makes friend, girl loses friend, girl slashes friend's throat and leaves her spraying arterial blood on the carpet while girl and her accomplices grab some bloodstained cash and squish their way out of the apartment to the nearest vodka kiosk. As Hilary says: "Girls can do anything!"